Could There Be a Real Batman?

On the eve of the release of The Dark Knight, an associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, E. Paul Zehr, has written a book that looks at just how realistic Bruce Wayne’s night job really is. The results may actually surprise you.

Here’s the most surprising thing: Being Batman isn’t actually impossible.

You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We’re seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics… If you found the percentage of billionaires and multiply that by the percentage of people who become Olympic decathletes, you could probably get a close estimate [of potential Batmans in the world]. The really important thing is just how much a human being really can do. There’s such a huge range of performance and ability you can tap into.